Category: Life

After I got past all the war with Iraq, war with North Korea, and war with anybody else whose name George W. can’t pronounce stories, I found an interesting article on CNN about Manual vs. Automatic transmissions. The article itself wasn’t all that great, it was pretty much the same old arguments of sticks are more reliable and get better gas milage vs. automatics leave your gun hand free. The part that caught my attention was this:

Prior to the 1974 endangered species act, automatic transmissions were filled with fluid that was 95 percent sperm whale oil…

I’ve never heard anything like that before, and I worked for an oil company for over 5 years. Oh well, live and learn.

I think I’m through with all the changes to the main page for now. I still need to edit all the other pages and update them to match. I’ve tested the layout in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, Mozilla 1.3b and 1.2.1 on Linux and Windows, and Konqueror 3.0 on Linux. It looks good to me in every browser I’ve tested now. Hopefully it will look OK on a Mac also. If you see any problems with the layout of this page, let me know.

Here’s what the updates did in case anyone’s curious. First, I changed the way the comments work so instead of popping up a new comment window, it opens a page in the browser where you can comment. I think this is much better. Pages that popup everywhere drive me crazy. Next I upgraded us to the latest version of Movable Type, 2.51. Also, while I was updating I decided to try some of their other features like TrackBack and Syndication through RDF files. These features make it easy for other people with blogs to link to our site.

These changes required a few modifications to the layout of the site, so I just went ahead and reverted back to Movable Type’s default layout. Of course then I had to tweak it a bit to make it look how I like it. The default font is a little bigger now, hopefully that’ll make it easier to read. It was extremely small before in some browsers.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the changes.

Words of wisdom from the late, great Douglas Adams.

I’m making a few changes to the site right now, so things may look a little funny. Rest assured everything will be back to normal soon.

I remember whenever we’d get back from a long holiday in school, we’d always have to write a paper about what we did. I’m not sure if they still make students do that today, but just in case, here’s mine:

The two weeks started off pretty wild. It’s a lot of work getting ready for Christmas – cooking, wrapping presents, keeping the cat and dog out of the tree, etc. OK, so Paige did most of that stuff, but watching her work really wears me out sometimes…

After all of the family visiting and stuffing ourselves silly on turkey and ham and everything that goes with it, things calmed down a bit. I feel like I finally got caught up on some sleep. We then started trying to organize ourselves a little better. I’m pretty much a pack rat, so for me organizing means going through all the things I haven’t looked at in years and throwing them away. I hope nobody needed a copy of Turbo Pascal for DOS, because I just pitched one in the dumpster. I think I made some real progress.

Of course, we also set aside some time for fun. We finally managed to defeat Baal on Nightmare in Diablo II. We took a trip to Sherman for shopping and Red Lobster. Geoff stopped by for a while. We also finally got around to seeing The Two Towers with Ben. It was even better than I expected, very impressive. The movie that is, not Ben, he’s still the same as always…

So after two weeks off I’m back at work, and next week I’ll be back in school also. It sounds like a bummer, but actually I’m excited about it. I’m taking three classes this semester. After that I’ll be just three classes away from graduating. I’ll even be able to take one of those classes online. So after this sememster I’ll only have to sit through two more classes. There’s a light at the end of my college tunnel and it gets a brighter every day. This time next year be living in a whole new world.

I just remembered, today is Wednesday so grades are out. I made A’s in all three of my classes last semester. That makes my cumulative GPA 3.909. That one B is going to haunt me forever…

We finally got around to going to the movies Sunday afternoon. I like going when it’s only $2 per person, that way I don’t feel quite so bad about paying $6.25 for a medium coke and popcorn.

Anyway, we saw Star Trek – Nemesis. I can’t put my finger on it, but there was just something missing. Some reviewers have said that this was the worst Star Trek movie of the 10, but I didn’t think it was that bad. It was kind of neat to finally see Wil Wheaton on the big screen. That poor guy just can’t seem to catch a break.

I’m sure we’ll be going back to see The Two Towers sometime this week. That should be a lot of fun.

Well, I made an 89 on my COBOL final. I thought I did better than that, but it’s hopefully still enough to get me an A in the course. I also finished up both program assignments tonight and turned them in. So I’m officially done with Fall 2002.

Now maybe we can go see some movies tomorrow and I’ll actually be able to pay attention instead of worrying about homework and tests. The big problem now is deciding what to see – Star Trek, James Bond, Analyze That?

Quick, somebody call Satan and ask him how the weather is down there.

My boss just walked into my office and showed me a report about Linux. He then went on to suggest that I start looking at using Linux on some of the computers in the district.

Of course I’m already running Linux on my desktop machine and on one of the servers at the high school. So I showed it to him and he actually seemed interested. The plan right now is to look at the K-12 Linux Terminal Server as a way to beef up our old Pentium 75’s by using them as thin clients.

The cost savings of reusing old computers, improved stability, lack of virus worries, etc. seem obvious to me. Now it’s just a matter of convincing a commitee of people from each campus. This should be a lot of fun.

I meant to put this in the previous post, but I forgot so I’ll just add it here. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than one post in a single day.

There was an article on CNN the other day about how The Two Towers was available on DVD in Shanghai for about a dollar. The article says DVD, but I’m pretty sure they were actually VCDs. Anyway, Patra was in China a while back and one of her friends from the cruise ship bought a copy of it. When they got back to the room to watch it, they discovered it was actually Clash of the Titans. I guess sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

I only have one more final exam to take this semester. Unfortunately it’s dealing with the COBOL programming language. I’ve been studying COBOL for a few months now and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was invented as some cruel punishment for programmers.

If anyone out there would like to see us and possibly win some free computer stuff, you should come to the [H]ard|OCP Hardware Workshop in Dallas on December 20. It starts at 6:00pm and will be followed by a presentation from AMD that will end around 11:00pm. It’s free to get in and there are lots of free prizes, so if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by. We’ll be there.

I came in to work this morning and checked my e-mail as usual. I had 10 new messages and PopFile correctly identified all of them as spam. It’s nice to find an intelligent, well-written program that actually does what it claims to do. It is Open Source and written in Perl, so I guess that’s to be expected.